Nostalgia n Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York - Essay Example

Nostalgia n Amitava Kumar's "Bombay-London-New York" n Bombay-London-New York, Amitava Kumar evokes an India f rural simplicity, ancient traditions and bewitching rituals. Through a string f stories, he shows how the Indian diaspora internalized this view and brought Bollywood, bhangra and biryani to Britan and the US to create an imaginary home away from home. Post-colonial ideas also figure large n Parallels and Paradoxes (Bloomsbury), n which the late Edward Said holds a long and involved conversation with the maestro Daniel Barenboim. Talk f Beethoven and Wagner soon gives way to issues f identity and authenticity. Said emerges not just as an intellectual giant, but also a deeply passionate man. The requirement f leaving one's place f orign and move from the periphery towards the centre, combined with the compulsion to look back and travel; homewards n a bid to understand one's history, is the force that drives much f recent Indian writing n English. The name Kumar has selected for his book signifies the journey that both he and his fellow writers have made, the distances they have traversed and the literary signposts they have passed. It happens often that compositions f exemplary character and intuition do not receive the desired attention from their creators. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes mysteries on a lark but tired f his detective, had him killed n a story, only to refresh him agan after a public outrage. A similar overlooking f one's own talents occurs n this Kumar's entertaining book. While the title may be reminiscent f a travel brochure, the book is an exhaustive thorough survey f Indian authors writing n English, living n both India and abroad. But, sifting through the literary ore, we find charming nuggets f Kumar's own life, gleaming like gold. Kumar's personal musings cover perhaps a fourth f his book but have an impact far beyond their length. The slender volume f his personal odyssey has enough pathos to overcome his intermittently interesting but mostly descriptive treatise on the Indian contribution to English literature. Similar to his an earlier excellent piece f writing, Passport Photos, this one is a multi-genre celebration f the fascinating literary journey that Kumar has undertaken as a reader and critic f Indian fiction. His own fiction and poetry, along with personal accounts, make this an imaginative exercise that explores many f the impulses that have helped create contemporary Indian fiction n English. The world literature has slowly awakened to the realization that Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and Arundhati Roy are not restricted to the ethnic press anymore; they are internationally renowned writers with considerable influence n the world f ideas. It is therefore particularly apt that there be a reassessment f Indian-English contribution to English literature and Kumar does this admirably through the prism f his own understanding. n Bombay-London-New York, Kumar highlights at the very beginning that his pages are to be read merely as "marginal entries n a book written by others." He quotes generously from novels and short stories, newspaper articles, reviews and interviews, and uses photographs to convey a sense f contemporary India and the Indian writer's experience. Kumar's canvas is as enormous ahis "reading practice" which he claims to have recorded for the purpose f this book. The issues he deals with are, likewise, numerous. Kumar does not incarcerate his survey to immigrant writing. We are taken to Pankaj Mishra's Butter chicken n Ludhiana: Travels n Small Town India , where an Indian born American kid asks a perplexed hotel manager "May I have a boddle f Bisleri Wadder." He ruminates on the nuclear bomb with Arundhati Roy (The End f Imagination), relives London's Bloomsbury circle with Mulk Raj Anand ( Conversations n Bloomsbury), revels n the celebration f Hanif Kureishi's sexually charged writing (My Beautiful Launderette, Sammie and Rosie Get Laid) and discusses Akhil Sharma's An Obedient father, the story f a corrupt Delhi bureaucrat who is also a child molester. Kumar's scholarship is inspiring; the reader can almost smell the musty library n which the author must have spent his time researching the writers, some f whom he even interviewed later. n addition to his literature survey, Kumar discusses diverse issues that would resonate with Indian immigrants. He points out the new found respectability f the Indian software elite and discusses their problems with work-permit (H-1 B) visas. Kumar criticizes the Indian film industry for portraying a regressive nationalist-paternal plot n their movies to cater to the conservative sections amongst the Indian expatriates n U.K. and the United States. He also delves into the social roles f writers, spending some time on the New Delhi based activist-play-write Safdar Hashmi (whose political activism resulted n his murder) and wonders if Indian writers n the United States can play an alike role. n exploring issues that have been discussed by earlier writers but not dissected, his writing is grounded extremely n the current Indian immigrant debates. n Bombay-London-New York, Kumar arises many questions and answers them. One f the first questions he addresses is that f language, f "choosing" to write n English. He says, "n India, the phrase 'Indian writer n English' seems to have been easily adopted as a name. But there is nothing natural n this naming. A well-known critic, Meenakshi Mukherjee, has commented, "If I were to write a novel n Marathi, I would not be called an Indian writer n Marathi, but simply a Marathi novelist, the epithet Marathi referring only to the language....No one would write a doctoral dissertation on the Indianness f my Marathi novel." Is there any reason why, when it comes to any Indian fiction n English, there should be an obsession with the issue f its Indianness" Bihar is the place n India that gave first lesson f thinking. He grew up n Bihar, considered somewhat uncharitably, as the arm-pit f India. The book provides an account f his childhood home and f the rituals n his grandmother's house, "that small town n India's most backward province". The juxtaposition f childhood memories with later experiences f material comfort and choice n a more liberated Western environment is crucial because it is true, but this is the same kind f conceit that has attracted criticism n recent Indian fiction for allegedly trying to exoticise an orientalist view f the homeland. Kumar goes through all the sleazy ramifications f small town India: Eve teasing (known n the Western world as sexual harassment), the dowry system (the bride's family pays money to the bridegroom) and sundry political rebellions. His tenure at a student hostel n New Delhi during his college years was not any better, with poor grades and a sense f what the author calls "his customary indolence." When he travels to the United States for graduate studies, Kumar lives the life f a typical Indian refugee, mixing spices with Progresso lentil soup to make it taste like Dal (a staple Indian dish). A large number f Indian novel n English are informed by an acute self-consciousness about the use f particular language for composition, with writers feeling compelled to explan or defend -- through characters such as Amit Chatterjee n Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, or Agastya Sen n Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August -- their positions n response to charges that their use f English denies them access to Indian reality. n Bombay-London-New York, Kumar allows that those who write n English (both n India and elsewhere) "reman several worlds away" from those who write n other languages, n spite f all the movement that is taking place across the globe and between cultures. But that he sanctions the new hybrid idiom's attempt to express the new hybrid experience is clear when he discusses that all-important question f audience, celebrating the "desperate grasping for authenticity, which produces... the mistress f spices, the heat and dust, sweating men and women n lisping saris, brought together n arranged marriages, yes, the honking traffic, and the whole hullabaloo n the guava orchard. n short, the sound f yakking Indians." Merger f all these and many other literary influences since childhood is reflected n the structure f Bombay-London-New York, which often seems chaotic as Kumar rushes from genre to genre, book to book, author to author, issue to issue and memory to memory. This is a heady mix, often dizzying, but then so is the hybrid concoction f a billion people and, most importantly, so is movement, especially the kind with which Kumar engages. When he combines his keen sense f discernment with his literary strengths-candid and straight writing-the resulting text transforms even commonplace events from his unruly youth into trenchant writing. Speaking f his sexual awakening, Kumar writes, "From the febrile imagination f a characteristically repressed Indian schoolboy poured out a Sadean fantasy f pulleys and hydraulics, elevation and latitudes, skn and glands that sweated sexuality." He writes f the dowry cash brought to his parent's house "Once I touched the notes: they felt slightly moist." His distress with the issue f displacement makes him explore the status f a Non-Resident Indian and the purpose f nostalgia. He writes: "As the fiction f so many contemporary Indian writers reveals, our memories as Indians are also memories f movements across different countries and continents. We have built our homes n Britain, n Burma, n South America, n the Caribbean, and n North America. If our past was all these places, can we be nostalgic for only one place Can we be nostalgic for a place that never was " n the book when it seems that Kumar is trying to answer the question f why we write, and (perhaps more importantly) how and why we read, he lyrically evokes the standard diasporic themes f abandonment, exile and romantic nostalgia for a "home" left behind. Somewhere n between there are loving portraits f the three cities f the title. The result is not so much a well-cooked biryani, where different ingredients are synthesized into a holistic meal, but more a juicy, multi-layered club sandwich. His insistence on the theme f movement, from east to west, implies the issues f exile, displacement and nostalgia, themes that have become synonymous with post-colonial literature as a whole. "What I am always going back to is the moment when I was going away," he says. Kumar characteristics his option f the airport as "the place to mark the beginning" to VS Naipaul and his novel, Miguel Street, but, really, this never seems like the beginning n Kumar's book. It is only the start f his journey to the United States, but surely, the beginning f his migration started when he left Patna for Delhi. The "provincial cosmopolitan's" entry into the realm f the "cosmopolitan cosmopolitan" marks the first step f what will prove to be a long journey. It was, after all, n Delhi that the author first bought used copies f Time and Newsweek, to prove that he was now "a citizen f the world". Kumar successfully managed to pull the different strands f his narrative - the autobiography, the anxieties f the writer n exile, the evolution f indigenous varieties f Indianness n London and New York - with considerable success. Kumar's prose is always stylish, his ideas always pulsate with energy and his humanity shines through every page. But his literary condemnation, deeply embedded n youthful exuberance, lacks bite. His writers have few, if any, warts and are just too angelic to be human. Kumar this book not only celebrates movement from one location to the other, but also the simultaneity f the locations. If his fictitious piece, 'Indian Restaurant', depicts some f the pathos f exile, then his remarkable poem 'Pure Chutney', embraces the vigorous synthesis f cultures that has, to a large extent, made the acceptance f Indian writing by the West possible. Kumar portrays a picture f India that is cut off from the rest f the subcontinent. Even though, we learn, he marries a Pakistani-American academic and moves among the Pakistani diaspora, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka appear superfluous to the "India" reimagined by the Asian diaspora. Works Cited Kumar, Amitava. Bombay-London-New York. New York: Routledge, 2002 Read More